Category: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Announced by Google on March 25 that Google is providing a way for websites to opt out of having their content that Google has crawled appear on Google Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, and Google+ Local search.

If your website contents have already been crawled and being displayed on Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, or Google+ Local search pages, and now you want them disappear from Google radar, Google promises to remove them within 30 days when you use that opt-out tool.

Unbelievable! Anybody in the search engine marketing world would need that?

Come on! It’s crazy. Who wants to opt out from being displayed on Google? I mean how much do I wish to have my contents being displayed and ranked on the first page of Google search results page. Especially those results page of shopping, flights, hotels and Google+ Local search pages. (Google+ Local was Google places before, in case you didn’t aware it.)

Go search Google for “cheap air tickets” for example, see how many search results are being displayed? 52 million! Google even add a search box directly on top of all organic search results. That tells us that Google itself is making money by attracting clicks on that search box there. Because flight niche is just too hot and too rich.

The same situation for shopping, hotels and Local search! Every business owner would love to beg for that display on first page of Google search results, even if it does cost big. For hot niches like hotels, people spend $10 or higher per click to display their ads on Google search result pages.

And the funny thing about Google shopping is, the way I know that to display the products on Google Shopping is by placing advertisements there. Not aware that Google will automatically crawl and display products from any eCommerce site on their shopping channel. Woo…I wonder what eCommerce sites would avoid such free ride on Google Shopping.

However I understand that any website will have some sort of contents that only available to maybe registered users. And I wondered if they could put some meta tag code to tell Google bot to avoid crawling or indexing those pages, would it be easier than having whole website being opt out of Google search results using that opt-out tool?